Time & Place: Top Hat and tales

The radio impressionist Mario Rosenstock is in tune with the times in a former iconic Dublin nightclub

I’ve been living in De Vesci House, a modern block of apartments situated beside the Purty Kitchen, for about three years. It used to be the Top Hat Ballroom. The penthouse has maintained a sense of its history by including a top hat-shaped window in its design.

Our apartment is on the ground floor to the right of the building and looks out to sea. Given its location, I figure I’m living where the stage used to be located when the Top Hat existed, so you could say Thin Lizzy and Nirvana and other great bands have played in my living room.

It’s the first place my wife Blathnaid and I bought together and, as with our first meeting, it was love at first sight. Our eyes met across a crowded dancefloor in the Kitchen nightclub in 1995. Neither of us was looking for someone at that stage; it just